Step 2: Start a new game. When you start the level, press "T". It should pop up with this text:

Delete everything in there with backspace, then type: "set DeusEx.JCDentonMale bCheatsEnabled True", and press enter. That enables cheats. Step 3: Use the same method to type in the word Ghost. This lets you fly, and move through walls. Step 4: You now have a three-dimensional dungeon map. Put Deus Ex on a laptop, fly around and describe the level to your PC's as they fight through it. Make up stats for all the enemies, traps, and treasure they encounter.

You can get a full list of other cheats here, along with help on how to set it up if it's not working. You'll want to use:

Invincibility:

god

Invisibility:

invisible

Disable Ghost Mode:

walk

You can also use cheats to teleport to the start of any level in the game, just by typing Open _____ (with the name of the level in the space). There are about 70 maps you can use for dungeons in this game. The full list is at the same link as above. Here's some good ones:02_NYC_Hotel: A new york street, with a crummy bar, hostage situation in a hotel, smuggler living in the sewers. I think I remember a secret Majestic 12 base under the street, too.03_NYC_BatteryPark: A homeless encampment in the park conceals an entrance to the hidden enclave of the Mole People.06_HongKong_WanChai_Market: Hong kong. The canals hold secret treasure, triad members war in the abandoned subways, there's a dungeon hidden behind secret levers in a femme fatale's hotel room.06_HongKong_VersaLife: Area 51 style facility masquerading as a normal business.10_Paris_Catacombs: Dystopian future Paris. Find your way down to the paris catacombs, which now serve as a battleground between freedom fighters and the police.10_Paris_Chateau: Old french mansion with a hidden dungeon under the wine cellar. No enemies, just figuring out how to penetrate the environment - perfect if your PC's need something to rob.You can use cheats like this in a lot of games. Two good ones:

Any game published by Bethesda (Skyrim, New Vegas, Morrowind) can be instantly turned into a 3D hex crawl map by pressing "`" ("Tilde", next to the 1 key) and typingTCL. More cheats here.

The Legend of Grimrock is a great dungeoncrawler with a level editor. Just click and drag to map out a dungeon. The best thing about it is that it comes with torches that burn out over time. Beware that the map size is a little small, though.

There's a few reasons why Deus Ex is the best choice for this:

1. It's old and cheap. You can get it for 8 bucks, and it will run on your shitty laptop with no problems.

2. It comes pre-loaded with RPG information.

Every door comes with a Lock strength and a Breaking strength - how easy it is to lockpick, and how easy it is to force. Just convert that information to a DC and you're good to go. The skill system also gives you info for hacking computers, keypads and security cameras, and disarming bombs. You don't need anything but the game open.

3. The dungeons are really fucking good.

They're massive, intricate, and they have as many routes through them as possible. The first level is famously a scale model of Liberty Island. Something as simple as a door can usually be blown up, lockpicked, hacked open from a nearby computer, or opened with a password. All the traps can be turned on your enemies, as can their turrets, their robots, the mutants they've been experimenting on. There's plenty of secret passages, treasure, traps. It's got the shit you need.4. There's a lot of good stuff in the setting, if you want to use it.You're dystopian cops in the post-cyberpocalypse, wearing trenchcoats and sunglasses at night (it's always night), beating down "Terrorists". Every single conspiracy is true. The police are in bed with the Illuminati who are fighting Majestic 12 who mastermind the Men In Black who bred the crocodiles in the sewers which are hunting down the Mole Men. Every street corner conceals a secret facility. To be a good cyber-cop, you have to pretend you don't notice any of this.In my first session, we got a lot of mileage out of playing this for laughs. The game itself manages to get away with playing it straight, though, because it does so much grounding work. It's core trick is that you always start in the scummy streets and abandoned warehouses of the world above, and slowly transition through into gonzo-land. Every dungeon is mapped out like a real place. You look through enough environments with stories like "Here's where they have their coffee breaks, here's the office, and here's where they ship out the steel" that by the time you've transitioned through to "Here's where they perform genetic experiments on the hobos", you've acclimatized. It's easy to reskin for D&D (just find-and-replace "Terrorist" with "Orc"), but it means you'll have to make a new story for the dungeon. You'll also miss the computer stuff: security cameras, hacking computers for pass codes to doors, hacking robots to turn them on their masters. For best results, use it with a something modern like Shadowrun, Nights Black Agents, or Cyberpunk.

2. It becomes clear that the society is inherently opposed to the PC's goal.

3. The PC's destroy the society.

I've never known why this happens. No-one ever plans any part of it. I make up a society, the PC's make up a goal, and the way our minds collide in play somehow naturally disintegrates into this pre-ordained pattern, to the constant surprise of everyone involved.

Here's an example: One of my players had their heart set on creating a democracy. After impersonating the ruler, he gathered all the nobles in town together and told them that they were all going to be demoted. He was actually bewildered and heartbroken when this didn't work. "My utopia!" he cried, as the party thief slaughtered noblemen.

Here's my attempt to explain it in detail.

1. I have a basic idea of how the session will run - a pre-made dungeon, encounter, something like that.

2. The PC's either ignore my pre-made stuff, or blow through it in record time and keep playing.

3. Forced into the delirious Improv Zone, I make up a Society on the spot. Even if I've got one that's been made up before we started, the PC's will force me into spinning up the details of some part I hadn't thought about. ("What do they do with their dead?" and then "Could we ride the corpse pillar down the death-pit?")

Often the details will be spun from the PC's themselves - they'll make a joke or something, and I'll go "Sure, that's how it works".

4. The PC's case the joint. As I make up the society, they research it, develop a goal or a way to achieve that goal, and start putting plans in action.

5. The "Gravity" of my campaign pulls towards escalation. It is very hard to calm things down, and very easy to make things worse. Thus, even if the PC's are in a calm situation, they soon find themselves sliding towards destruction and anarchy. (This isn't a conscious decision on my part - just the natural effect of what I'm interested in, probably.) Naturally, they eventually end up fleeing the ruins of society.

6. Because of this society-destroying style of play, solving a problem naturally creates a dozen more. The PC's have a bizarre amount of agency on the world - far more than anyone could have in real life. Everything they go through is warped or devastated until the game world is entirely defined by PC-created problems, and I don't have to make any plot hooks on my own at all. The players have made their own world to play in.

It kind of emulates Jack Vance's Cugel's Saga. The society is a trap for the protagonist, and the last page is the protagonist fleeing as the society is destroyed behind him. It's a strange, wonderful thing, and I've loved running it. The last session has finished, though: The players have achieved a picaresque kind of closure, with everyone dead and the last city they tried to save still destroyed.

I'm exploring a more classic kind of dungeon crawling, now, trying to fill in my weaknesses: I never understood XP, Treasure, Dungeons. I had the players level up whenever they wanted. When they reached the treasure vault of the thief king and asked what was in it, I replied - "Uh ... what do you want?" I've never had a clear understanding of giving consistently upgrading challenges and abilities in an arena of deadly exploration and combat, and I'm going to give that a go.

Yo, don't cross off those torch slots. Just stick that shit on the wandering monster dice.

No look, Kirin Robinson's Light cards are a perfectly elegant graphical interface and all, but you can buy 8 torches for three silver. You can just get twenty of those things, cheap as chips. Nobody's got time to count slots when you've got twenty of the things in your pack.

Roll a d6 every turn. If you roll a 1, a monster finds you. If you roll a 6, any torch you have lit goes out. Same thing for lantern oil, but it lasts three times as long: Give it a cross the first two times, and make it burn out on the third strike.

So the dice works as the threat of time passing. It unifies the monsters and light together into a single horrible Time Check. Every ten minutes you spend in this wretched place, you're rolling it to see if something shitty happens. Ghost Stories has a Curse Die like this, a massive black thing that falls to the table with a THUNK.

If my math is right, a lucky torch should go out roughly once every six turns (One hour), which will work out to about 20 rooms if you're using Greed n' Speed (Assuming lightweight treasure and that the party is stopping to search for stuff). Trying to predict dice is crazy, of course - I'll have to see if it's too harsh once I run it.

Write every piece of treasure the PC's find on this sheet of paper. As the party fills up the slots through 1, 2, 3 and 4, they grow slower as a group.

This symbol shows how often the party has to roll a wandering monster check. The top is every five rooms (or 120 feet if you feel like counting squares). As they lug around more treasure they walk through rooms slower, which means they'll need to roll more often. This group speed has no effect on how far each individual character can move.*

For those unfamiliar with wandering monsters: There's a 1/6 chance of meeting a group of random monsters every ten minutes. The distance under this symbol is an abstract representation of how far the party can move in that time. You should also roll on top of that whenever the party does something that would take ten minutes (Like searching a room or fighting some dudes), or make a lot of noise (Like breaking open a door).

This is the party's Flee check. If they need to escape a bad situation, the party and the monsters both roll a d20. The heroes adds the number next to this symbol. The monsters may add +2 if they're fast, or -2 if they're slow. Whoever rolls highest has outrun the other group. If the monsters win, they get a free attack. If they party wins, they escape - but the monsters will still be somewhere behind them.

Why Group encumbrance? Why only for treasure?

Ok: "The Adventurers" places you as a group of tomb-robbers fleeing from a rolling boulder. The more treasure you seize, the slower you can outrun the boulder. At the end, the character who escaped with the most treasure wins.

Encumbrance is meant to be the same kind of risk/reward mechanic. The more treasure you pick up, the slower you go, the more wandering monsters you roll. So in a very direct way, picking up more treasure makes you more likely to be killed. Escape with enough treasure, and you can level up.

I can reach it!

I love that idea, but two simulationist mechanics have obscured it with book keeping.

1. Encumbrance is tracked individually, but the party moves as a group. Unless you split up, the difference is meaningless.

2. Encumbrance is tracked for everything, not just treasure. You're not being penalized for being greedy, you're being penalized for being cautious (by bringing a lot of stuff into the dungeon).

Matt Rundle's Anti-hammerspace Item Tracker is still my only love, and the only way I'd think of tracking individual items. Greed and Speed is designed for a different purpose: condensing the risk/reward of old-school treasure hunting down to it's purest, abstract form.

(As a side benefit, it should unify the players a little. It's a specific sheet in the middle of the table, bulging with the treasure they've earned together - there's some pride in that.)

This is part of my ongoing attempt to understand old-school dungeon crawling, and make all these old weird rules I always forget actually work for my players. I'm running Barrowmaze, and the Crawl still isn't perfect yet: player mapping and light sources are still strange round pegs I'm trying to slot into the square holes in my table. I'll keep turning it over, and let you know what I'm trying out.

*If you want, you could even leave one character behind with the treasure and have everybody else move as if they're unencumbered.

You're a busy GM. You don't have the spare time or brainpower to give every hireling a different personality. What you can do is give them a unique way to flip out under stress.

Roll up one of these for as many hirelings as you can keep remembering this stuff for. Whenever an appropriate situation comes along, roll a morale check. If they fail, they do whatever treacherous, cowardly or inept thing you've rolled for them.

1. Cowardice

Uncontrollable shakes: -4 to all rolls.

Paralyzed with fear.

Flees.

Blind panic: attacks everything at random, friend or foe

Won't stop screaming: roll for wandering monsters.

Falls prone and drops whatever they're holding.

Deserts if the party sleeps in the dungeon

Tries to surrender

Cracks under the pressure of slow exploration and runs wildly through the dungeon.

Holes up in a room and refuses to keep going

You can roll d6 on this table to get a Panic result any time the henchmen see something that would send them screaming.

2. Treachery

Steals from party. If they think they're about to be discovered, they frame another henchman.

Sells out the party to a dungeon faction for thirty silver pieces.

Convinces other henchmen to mutiny and stab the party in the back when they find a good haul.

Cheats other hirelings at cards when the party rests: fights break out.

Thinks they know better than the party. Contests their decisions, rousing dissent.

Bargains for better pay at the worst possible time.

Snitches on the party if they do anything illegal

Leaves in the night, stealing as much treasure as they can.

Paranoid: Believes the party has betrayed them.

Cuts and runs when the party needs them to get out of a jam.

3. Ineptitude

An important piece of equipment breaks mid-use due to their shoddy maintenance.

Loses the things entrusted to them.

Shaky hands: Drops what they're holding at a crucial moment.

Bad cold: Sneezes when the party's trying to sneak.

Cries all night. Can't sleep.

Snores all night. The rest of the party can't sleep.

Stress eater: Eats all of the party's rations at night.

Has a terrible disease. Failed morale check means they won't reveal it, and the party will catch it if they rest together. (If you can't think of anything better, -2 max HP every day until they reach 1 HP).

Beserker rage: Attacks the nearest thing, friend or foe, until they or everyone else are dead.

Fatalistically accepts death.

Leave no man behind: Refuses to abandon a single fellow henchman

Finishes off fallen PC's - "There was no hope for them, I just eased their pain."

Roll a d4 and a d10 to get the list and entry for your terrible hireling. It'd be better if they fit into a single list that you could roll one dice on, of course - anybody out there want to finish this off?

I've been on this hireling tangent because I'm planning to try all the bits of old-school dungeon crawling that I've previously ignored. Starting with DCC has crippled some aspects of my D&D education: I never understood hirelings, charisma, wandering monsters, light sources, player mapping. The slow and dangerous exploration of a megadungeon has been totally absent from my campaign. Maybe I'm not even old school.

Before you enter the dungeon, you can make a Tavern Roll to pick up information or hire people. Roll d10+CHA, and look up the result on the table below.0 or less: You've tipped off one group of the dungeon's inhabitants. They'll be prepared for you.1: Your loose lips have inspired a rival group to try and beat you to the treasure.
Roll 2d6, and subtract one from the other. If it's a positive number, they'll arrive at the dungeon that many hours after you. If it's negative, they'll arrive that many hours before you. You can get a bonus or penalty to this roll if you take a faster or slower route to the dungeon.2 or 3: Inept, cowardly, or treacherous Hirelings.4 or 5: False rumor6 or 7: True rumor8 or 9: Loyal and/or skilled Hirelings.10: Roughly sketched map of a small part of the dungeon.11+: You've got an inside man. Choose one of the groups that live in the dungeon. One member of that group will help you, for a price. Leaving doors open and such will be cheap, helping to kill their comrades will be very expensive.

Warn your players: Rolling here means they'll be spreading information about their quest, and if they roll badly they'll attract unwanted attention. Make the roll in secret, so they don't know if their rumors or hirelings are trustworthy.

The d10 means Charisma has a serious impact, but every player can get a good or bad result. With +3 charisma, for instance, you still have a 20% chance of getting a false rumor. Nevertheless, the players will trust information and hirelings gathered by a player with good charisma, and distrust anything found by a player with bad charisma.

Each roll is one night in a tavern, buying drinks and chasing up leads. They can roll as many times as they want, but the good information will slowly go dry and observers will start to get suspicious. Give them -1 to the second roll, then -2, etc.

Edit: If someone is only interested in hiring retainers, not gathering rumors (or vice versa) just change the Rumor entries to Hirelings (or vise versa). If searching for rumors, 2-5 would become false rumors, 6-9 would become true rumors.

Level 0: Get ability scores, Race, Background, and d6+Con HP. Get equipment from your background, and use the rest of your gold to buy Armour and Weapons. You can have proficiency with whatever you buy, because you're shit enough already, but you'll have to with your class proficiencies once you hit first level.

This took me ten minutes, and Matt half an hour. If you get 50 XP, you can level up to:

Level 1: Choose a class, and gain all it's associated benefits and suchlike. You upgrade to the HP of your class, rather than adding it to your level 0 HP. This part took me fifteen minutes.

D&D Next thinks it's fun to read through thirteen spells and choose the best three. Roll on these tables if you don't.

Wizards:

(3 Spells, 3-4 Cantrips)

Clerics:

(2-3 Cantrips, All level one spells (Jesus Fuck))

Level 2: Get everything you normally receive on level up. Choose a Specialty, and gain the feat it gives you.This took ten minutes again.

Tada! From level 2 onward everything works exactly as normal, and your characters will be just as powerful as everybody else. The level 0 characters may have a tough time with the monsters from D&D Next, but if it's too much of an issue you can just use AD&D monsters until you get to level 1. They may be weak Next characters, but they're excellent AD&D PC's.

For extra old school, try:

XP for Gold: Just get the XP values from all the monsters in the area, and convert that number into gold. Carouse that gold away and you earn XP, of course. Season to taste.

It is not made to entertain you; it is made to destroy you. It holds nothing but negatreasure and negaexperience.

Scholars debate whether or not there should actually be anything good at all within a Negadungeon. James Raggi's "The Tower" ends with the sentence: "There is no treasure in the tower". Certainly, the players need to believe something good can come of entering. It's up to you whether it's ok to deceive them.

James Sutherland enters Silent Hill because he's received a letter from his dead wife. That's the kind of thing that brings people to Negadungeons: Doomed obsessions. Everybody knows that finding his dead wife won't end well, even James. But he keeps going, because:

2. Once you start the Negadungeon, you're committed to finishing it.

I don't mean physically - the door should always be open behind you. But once you've entered, things can never go back to the way they were. Something has changed in you, or in the world. You're compelled to keep going, even though it just gets worse and worse the further you go.

Even if you leave, you act as one cursed. When you sleep, you'll dream of the Negadungeon, and wake with blood on your hands.

3. Descending is morally despicable.

It might start small - an old man tries to stop you from going down, and you have to tie him up. Next thing you know you're breaking the ancient seals, disturbing the dead, killing the guardian children. It's obvious that going down is bringing evil into the world.

In Dark Souls, a city was flooded to contain an ancient evil. To descend, you have to kill the last holy man and release the flood gates.

4. This is all your fault.

It's very important that the players decided to come here. You're not allowed to trap them in: They must trap themselves. They walked past the warning signs, they knocked over the guardian sigils. When push comes to shove they should be crying "Why? Why did we go to Death Mountain?"

The flipside of this: A Negadungeon is a great addition to a campaign setting even if the players never go there. Having a place that the players avoid at all costs is great.

Why would anyone enter a Negadungeon?

Something was stolen from you and taken to the bottom. Each level you descend, worse things are stolen.

Fell from a regular dungeon.

To save a dead PC.

Sick curiosity.

Greed

Looking for revenge

Why would anyone keep going down a Negadungeon?

The sunk costs fallacy.

You're cursed, Dave is dead, the zombies you've unleashed are destroying the countryside. "Well, we have to keep going, or all this will have been for nothing!"

At the end of the Negadungeon, you are allowed to reveal that the goal was useless, and it was all for nothing.

Edit: What's the point?

1. They're different, strange, and your PC's don't expect them. It challenges expectations, shakes things up.
2. They change the Risk-Reward template of a dungeon into a Doomed Journey; an experience like Heart of Darkness, Silent Hill, or this guys journal. That's a cool type of story to emulate.
3. Losing is fun.

Leech: A small black tube with teeth that latches on and sucks out your blood, secreting toxins to stop you feeling it.

Tick: An insectile Dracula that hides on your body. It's tiny head burrows deep within you, excreting poisons that numb and paralyze, while it feeds the bloated body above.

Tapeworm: A long worm that lives in your intestines and eats most of your food.

Guinea Worm: Thin white Dracula that enters your body when you eat tainted meat, growing up to several feet inside you. When it's ready to breed, it pokes it's head out through a blister and sets your leg on fire. When you dunk the limb in water, it releases it's young in a big white cloud.

Horsehair Worm: This one grows up your spinal chord until mating season arrives, when it reprograms your brain and forces you to throw yourself into the nearest lake. As you drown, it crawls out of you to mate with other Horsehair worms doing the same thing.

Dracula Bat: A species of bats that sucks blood from your toes as you sleep. Any adventurers that sleep in their caves will wake woozy and weak.

Emerald jewel Dracula: A wasp-woman Dracula, known for her Breeding Stings. The first sting paralyzes you. The second sting pours venom into your brain, leaving you a zombie. The Dracula then leads you back to her lair and pours you full of her young, eating your legs for sustenance before flying out. Over the next few weeks her young will eat their way out of you as you watch.

Mosquito Woman: Emaciated women with transparent wings and a long, lethal proboscis. They swoop down, spear you with their proboscis, and then drink their fill. When they've finished they waddle away, bloated and happy, leaving you a drained-out husk.

Changling: A baby Dracula that's placed in the womb of an expecting mother while she sleeps. Born as the "Twin" of the real child, and slowly usurps it.

Childblight: Sexually-transmitted Dracula. Seems to cause miscarriages - in reality, your children will be born into the Draculasphere.

Glass Book: A book that steals your knowledge as you read it. Clever sorcerers know how to force them to give knowledge up, in the same way that snake charmers harvest venom.

Strangler Fig: A seed that plants itself over your body, then slowly grows over your limbs. At first they'll grow bloated and powerful, making you run or punch better. Eventually, it will paralyze your mind and leave you to watch helplessly as it controls your body.

Ghoul: One who eats corpses to gain their power. Will typically trail after the party, fleeing if seen, eating the corpses of all they kill.

Nega-Man: Looks like an inverted photograph of a human. When it touches you, it steals a part of your soul - a thief skill, a spell, or your attack bonus.

Dracula Husband: A sack of wet meat. Chooses a lover and secretes poison into them. Once the lover's been poisoned, they forget all their old goals and live only to serve the Husband.

Dracula Wife: A Succubus.Sleeps with humans so that it can feed from their dreams.

Body Snatcher: It takes over your body by feeding you a special poison and then chanting, leaving your soul in it's last body. It will typically poison it's old body moments before transferring to a new one. Any body it inhabits will begin to rapidly grow hair within about a week.

Husk: Hollow humans that must stuff their empty bodies with stolen organs. Usually find places as rich nobles, where they can fund the constant organ replacements they need.

Card Shark: Grifter Dracula that feeds off bargains made with with hard-done-by gamblers.

Two-Faced Dracula: Appears before wizards and promises them incredible knowledge - in return, they just need to let it grow off the back of their head as a second face. It knows nothing. It'll keep stalling for time for as long as possible.

Dracula Monkey: Invisible creature that clings to your back, feeding off your happiness and dragging your down into depression and madness.

Bloat: A tiny creature that infects the mind of a host, making them crave the contact of others. Every creature the host touches will melt and bind onto them, eventually forming a massive ball of dripping humanity.

Skeleton Pox: Dracula virus that eats your skin and organs from the extremities inwards. Eventually there's nothing left but your skeleton, which is then free to dance the night away.

Devil-Boob: The underside looks like a limpet mouth. Replaces a breast and feeds your offspring Devil Milk, twisting your babies until they become it's Dracula Children.

Leg Horse: Those foolish enough to sleep in the Lair of the Leg Horse will see him in their dreams, a creature made of dozens of galloping legs shrieking "Join me or Die!". All who accept wake to find their legs gone - another pair added to the Leg Horse.

Shadow: Murders your reflection and replaces them, using you to see through to the human world. It grows more confident the more it sees. Slowly it will stop the pretense of copying your actions and start breaking through into reality.